Even though it’s your goal to get sponsored posts, it’s easy to freeze once someone actually wants to sponsor you. Rates can vary so much that it’s hard to know where to start — you don’t want to overshoot and miss out on potential sponsors, but you also don’t want to set your rates too low and leave money on the table. Where should you start?
How much are other influencers charging?
Your first step is to get an idea of what other people in your niche (and with similar influence) are charging. Check out people who have similar subscriber/follower counts, looking for their sponsorship page or media kit on their site to see what they charge (and what their sponsorship packages entail).
If you’re friends with other people in your niche, or in Facebook groups with other influencers, you can also bring it up as a discussion topic — some people might get cagey about their rates, but a lot of people are open to sharing them.
In general, here are a few very rough estimates to get you started:
- If you’re brand new and still building a following (but do have an audience), $20-100 is a good starting point (depending on what goes into the sponsorship — see below)
- If you have an established, engaged audience, $75-250 is a good place to start
- If you have a large audience, prices go up from there — again, depending on how you’ll be featuring the sponsor and how many platforms you’ll be featuring them on
Offer different package prices
Different sponsors will have different interests and needs — one sponsor might want to go whole-hog and purchase a full-featured sponsorship, another one might want to dip their toes in and do a small sponsorship first. Giving potential sponsors more than one option makes it more likely that one of the options will fit their needs. It also makes them more likely to say “yes” — instead of their decision being a yes or a no on one specific package, it becomes a decision of which package to choose.
A good place to start is with three tiers (small, medium, and large options, if you will) based on price. Once you start getting more sponsors, you can create packages for specific needs if you’re getting a lot of requests (a “we just launched a product” package, or a giveaway-oriented package, for example).
Here are some potential components for your sponsorship packages:
- Mentioning the company or product as a sponsor (in the video or post, as well as in the description of the video)
- Doing a review of their product
- Building a tutorial or a look around their product
- Doing a giveaway of one of their products
- Social media posts in addition to other posts/videos
- Featuring them as a sponsor in your email newsletter
Don’t forget to include these numbers on your sponsorship page:
Sponsors want to know what they’re paying for — not just how many posts, but how many eyeballs. With that in mind, you’ll want to include this information on your sponsorship page (or in the information you send potential sponsors):
- Pageviews and unique visitors per month to your site (or YouTube channel), averaged over the last 3-6 months
- YouTube subscribers, along with number of total views, average number of views per month, and minutes watched per video (you can learn where to find all of these stats in ourposton YouTube analytics)
- For each of your social media profiles, include the number of followers, average number of new followers per month, average number of likes/retweets, average number of impressions per day/week
- Reader and viewer demographics, broken down by gender, location, and age
- Most popular posts or videos on each platform or in general (especially if they’re previous sponsorships), along with the specific numbers on their views
Obviously, you can modify this depending on your specific situation. If sponsorship (or the specific sponsor package they’re interested in) doesn't include a Facebook post that highlights them as a sponsor, they don’t need to know
Also, make sure that sponsors know you follow the FTC guidelines and will be disclosing the sponsorship — check out this post for more on those guidelines and why you should follow them.
What to do next:
- Research people in your niche with similar audience and engagement levels to see how much they’re charging
- Create three tiers of sponsorship options
- Put together your statistics to go with the sponsorship information
- Add those sponsorship options to your media kit and/or your sponsorship page on your website
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